Feiffer ’07 Takes the Lead in Tigers Be Still

Halley Feiffer ’07 may have her juiciest acting role yet in the new off-Broadway play, Tigers Be Still, which opened this week at the Roundabout Theater Company’s Black Box Theater. The Sam Gold-directed play was written by Kim Rosenstock.

Feiffer says, “I play Sherry, a 24-year-old art therapist who is emerging from a six-month-long depression as she embarks on her first job, teaching art to Middle School children and working on the side as an art therapist with a troubled young man. Though my depression has lifted, my life is still in shambles—I live with my sister who is always drunk and on the couch; my mother lives upstairs and hasn’t come out of her room in a year; my boss carries a rifle, and a tiger is on the loose in my town.”

In a rave review of the play in The New York Times, Charles Isherwood writes: “Ms. Feiffer’s perky Sherry shares [her boss] Joseph’s determination to pretend to a confidence she doesn’t always feel. Chronically without a boyfriend and insecure, Sherry always seems to be on the verge of offering an abject apology for something, for anything. She’s anxious to please and worried she probably won’t. Despite awkwardly flapping arms, nerd-girl glasses and prim ponytail, Ms. Feiffer’s sweetly gawky portrayal never tips into caricature.”

In his Reuters/Hollywood Reporter review, Frank Scheck says, “the first-rate ensemble mines the rich material for all it’s worth” and adds that “Feiffer’s Sherry is charmingly geeky and vulnerable.”

Tigers Be Still also stars Natasha Lyonne, Reed Birney and John Magaro, and runs through Nov. 21. Roundabout Theater Company’s Black Box Theater is located at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater, 111 West 46th Street, Manhattan, 212-719-1300. Tickets are $20 and can be purchased here.